GroupBy – Free SQL Server Training

GroupBy.org is free technical training by the community, for the community. Volunteer speakers submit abstracts at GroupBy.org and you – the attendee – vote to pick the sessions. Want to present your own session or just vote on others? Join us at GroupBy.org.

As the DBA for an Agile, Sprint-based team, you may feel like the bottleneck at every turn. You’ve stuck with the existing processes and tools because it’s what you know. After all, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Right?

I have good news! With only a few new skills and free tools from Microsoft, you can join the Agile & DevOps revolution to help accelerate your team, product, and data infrastructure.

In this session I’ll use the newest version of SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) to model an existing database and then demonstrate each step from modification to a working, automated deployment. I’ll highlight the configuration options that matter most, provide solutions for overcoming common problems across environments, and show you what to do once the release is ready for production.

After seeing the possibilities, you’ll be ready to change those old processes. And in no time at all, you’ll be the talk of the team as they try to keep pace with you!

You've been writing T-SQL queries for a few years now, and when you have performance issues, you've been updating stats and using OPTION (RECOMPILE). It's served you well, but every now and then, you hit a problem you can't solve. Your data's been growing larger, your queries are taking longer to run, and you're starting to wonder: how can I start getting better query plans?

The secret is often comparing the query plan's estimated number of rows to actual number of rows. If they're different, it's up to you - not the SQL Server engine - to figure out why the guesses are wrong. To improve 'em, you can change your T-SQL, the way the data's structured and stored, or how SQL Server thinks about the data.

This session won't fix every query - but it'll give you a starting point to understand what you're looking at, and where to go next as you learn about the Cardinality Estimator.